CAS Seminar – 1rst October 2024
CAS Seminar – 1rst October 2024
16.00-18.30
CAS Library
Maria Paula Prates “Indigenous Women, Extractivism and Health in Brazil”
Cecilia McCallum “Caesarean Section in Brazil in Intersectional Perspective: Indigenous Women’s Experiences”
Abstracts
Indigenous Women, Extractivism and Health in Brazil Maria Paula Prates
In this presentation, I aim to address and demonstrate how territorial devastation and reproductive injustices are imbricated. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic studies carried out among Indigenous women from lowland South America, I take seriously the understanding of some interlocutors that their bodies are their territories, and their territories are their bodies. I then argue that the Anthropocene is embodied in Indigenous women’s lives through an extractivism of vitalities. Non-consensual episiotomies, caesarean sections and forced sterilisation are, in some way, among the consequences of territorial damage that for centuries has made Indigenous technologies of care — such as knowledge of plants and relationships with spirits and other-than-humans — difficult, even impossible, for some collectives. Therefore, an increased medicalisation of women’s life cycles has been accompanied by the extractivism, devastation and pollution of the Earth’s flesh. I put into conversation what happens across scales: on the one hand, mining activities, deforestation, and water contamination; on the other, bodily compositions that are sometimes made stronger and sometimes weakened by biomedical colonial practices. The weak/strong and hot/cold pairs play an important role in Indigenous cosmopolitics and will drive the conceptualisation of the extracting and composing vitalities framework.
Caesarean Section in Brazil in Intersectional Perspective: Indigenous Women’s Experiences Cecilia McCallum, et al. [1]
This paper approaches C-Section in Brazil from an intersectional perspective through a focus on indigenous women’s birth experiences. Caesarean surgery is the principal form of childbirth for all women in Brazil, and its’ prevalence amongst indigenous women has grown significantly in the past two decades. Successive state programs since the 1980s did not reduce the high national rate, which grew during the COVID-19 pandemic in both public and private care. This paper analyses qualitative data obtained through a sub-project of the NB2 study- Nascer no Brasil II or ‘Born in Brazil II’ – a national survey conducted in 2022-2023 with a sample of over 22.000 women admitted for childbirth in 465 public and private institutions averaging 100 or more births a year, of whom 176 women self-declared as indigenous. Firstly, it reviews epidemiological literature on indigenous reproductive health and maternal mortality in Brazil. Secondly, it analyses 13 semi-structured interviews with indigenous women who gave birth in public hospitals, contacted as part of a qualitative sub-project of the NB2 survey conducted by the RepGen Collective[2] (the authors of the present paper). In addition, it considers two interviews resulting from an online survey[3] conducted by the RepGen Collective in 2021, entitled “Covid-19 Pandemic and Reproductive Practices of Women in Brazil”[4]. Analysis of the indigenous women’s accounts of their experiences of pre- and post-natal care, and in hospital care, along with consideration of the review of quantitative analysis, enables an intersectional understanding of birthing and reproductive governance in Brazil.
[1] Authors’s affiliations: Cecilia Anne McCallum (UFBA) / University of St-Andrews; Maiara Damasceno da Silva Santana (ISC/UFBA); Ana Paula dos Reis (ISC/UFBA); Greice Menezes (ISC/UFBA); Maria do Carmo Leal (ENSP/Fiocruz); Andreza Rodrigues (EEAN/UFRJ); Claudia Bonan (IFF/Fiocruz); Nanda Duarte (IFF/Fiocruz)
[2] RepGen is a collective of researchers who founded the research group Gender, Reproduction and Justice/REPGEN, coordinated by Dr. Claudia Bonan (IFF/FIOCRUZ) and Dr. Ana Paula dos Reis (ISC/UFBA) and registered as (dgp.cnpq.br/dgp/espelhogrupo/8610317420095330) in the Directory of Research Groups of the CNPQ of Brazil. The group brings together researchers from the Fernandes Figueira National Institute for Women’s, Children and Adolescents’ Health (IFF/Fiocruz), the Rene Rachou Institute (IRR/Fiocruz Minas), the Collective Health Institute of the Federal University of Bahia (ISC/UFBA) and the Anna Nery School of Nursing at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (EEAN/UFRJ).
[3] The study, “Covid-19 Pandemic and Reproductive Practices of Women in Brazil”, is part of the multicenter research project “Covid-19, risk, impact and gender response”, coordinated by Dr. Denise Pimenta (IRR/Fiocruz Minas), approved by CONEP under CAAE 39133020.8.0000.5091, which had financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The study also has partnerships with the Covid-19 Fiocruz Observatory and the Research Group on Women, Children and Adolescents/Nascer in Brazil (ENSP/Fiocruz), who support the study with three research grants.
[4] In this study, 8,313 women in Brazil responded to questions about their reproductive health and healthcare. Among these respondents were 307 women who gave birth, 177 by C-section and 130 by ‘normal’ delivery.